Gig: Jon-Rae Fletcher

Jon Rae Fletcher / Ryan Driver

Imperial Pub (back room). Friday, July 24, 2009.

How has Jon-Rae Fletcher changed in the past couple years? Consider these lines from "Best of My Time":

I've heard some people say

forty bucks is too much to pay

when you're out drinking the night away

Back in the days when he was backed by the rollicking River, he'd lean into the final line: "But I say it ainnnnnnnnnnnnnn't". Now, the song's a little less rambunctious, and on this night, hitting that same line, he says, with an implied chuckle, "Well it kinda is."

I tend to think we kind of like to create little narratives for our pop heroes, and a little switch like this is grist for the mill in the tale of Jon-Rae Fletcher's own mythopoetical tale of recklessness and redemption, a prodigal son of the scene returning as a visitor to dispatch the wisdom of lessons learned.¹

Playing again in the cozy back room of the Imperial Pub — site of another Jon-Rae gig thirteen months ago when he was bringing his new songs to the old town — there was a bit of a smaller crowd this time, about a couple dozen, all told. I was out with R., a friend from the Old Days, who came out based only on my recommendation. Honoring the vibe of the place, I was unironically drinkin' bottles of 50 and generally enjoying the surroundings. "The white piano haunts my dreams," R. lamented as we settled into the back room, looking at the low-slung stage and the old stand-up piano flanking it. There's usually a clear demarcation between the Imperial's regulars and folks coming out for a show like this. The regulars, for one thing, are given the respect of place that they can head outside through the door behind the stage and go for a smoke.² One such guy — scruffy beard, Tiger Cats jacket — ducked out and came back in during Ryan Driver's opening set. Sitting down beside that piano for a minute, he seemed to be taking it all in as he pulled what looked like a small piccolo from his pocket and looked, for one queasy second, like he was going to start playing along, before heading back into the main area of the bar.

I was mostly familiar with Ryan Driver for his role in some of the Rat-Drifting bands. That's as good a sign-post as any to give some indication of what he was up to, a sort of fractured folk sound. Playing solo acoustic in a variety of tunings, mostly involving a high string or two being flattened enough to give the guitar a bit of a banjo-y sound. Driver has a pleasing voice (shades of, say, Sandro Perri and Bob Wiseman) and could hit the high notes cleanly when he wanted to — though sometimes, for effect, he'd mess with those those as well. Musically, his songs got by without a strong melodic sense, eschewing easy hooks for a trickier internal logic, dodging traditional structure to the extent that most of the time the ending of the song came as a sudden and unexpected stop. Sometimes, music like this turns me off, but Driver kept each song going with enough momentum that I was carried along. It helps that he's clearly got the chops to pull this off. Mighta just been the 50 speaking, but I dug this.

I'd come in expecting that Jon-Rae's set would be solo acoustic, so it was a pleasant and interesting surprise to see that this was going to be a bit more expansive, with Crystal Dee Denham's bass and Denver Rawson's trombone reproducing their fine work on the recent Oh, Maria album. Also somewhat unexpected was Jon-Rae's re-embrace of his own back catalog, as he split the set between the new album and his older stuff, something that he has pretty rigourously avoided in the past year. So besides solid runthroughs of "The Big Talker" and "Downtown", we were treated to an Old Songs one-two of "Time and Effort" and "Two Hands" as well as later River-era standards such as "Best of My Time" and "Fuck Me". The trips to the past even stretched back to "Fourteen Years", a song Jon-Rae said he wrote, in fact, fourteen years ago, his first country song after being in a "terrible teen band". The set ended with an excellent solo take of "Fire", which Jon-Rae would have left on to go out on a high note had he not been called back for a couple more, including "Come Back to Me", not heard in these parts for quite some time.

A very encouraging set. Jon-Rae comes across as being more comfortable in his own skin than he was a year ago, far less tentative, and reconciled to his own past good work.

Listen to a track from this set here.

---

¹ Which is to say, of course, that I have no notion as to what's a biographical clue and what's just a good line, just that it is pretty irresistible to try and wrap all of this up into a little story where the art and the artist blend into each other.

² I've also wondered if there's any interesting byplay at that back door between the Imperial's patrons and the non-overlapping group of guys hanging out at the discount sneaker place right beside there. Take note, prospective documentarians, slice-of-life observers or aspiring odd-couple sitcom writers.